Amazon Web Services Announces Eight Winners of the Global City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN),
today announced the winners of the first City on a Cloud Innovation
Challenge. The New York City Department of Transportation, City of
Asheville, London City Airport, and the City and County of San Francisco
Planning Department were each awarded $50,000 in AWS credits, and
application developers Azavea, Neptune Technology Group, NuCivic, and
Str LLC were each awarded $25,000 in AWS credits. The eight winners were
selected by AWS and a panel of worldwide experts based on the impact of
their solution, likelihood of long-term success, implementation of AWS
services, and the potential to help other local governments solve
similar challenges. To learn more about how public sector customers are
using AWS and the AWS GovCloud (US) Region, visit http://aws.amazon.com/publicsector/.

Four grand prize winners were selected for the Best Practices Award,
recognizing innovative and impactful local government projects running
on the AWS Cloud:

New York City Department of Transportation – Mobile and web
applications that make real-time transportation information more
accessible and useful to residents and visitors, including an
interactive map of city parking regulations, a pedestrian city travel
planning app, and online maps of construction sites and capital
projects.

City of Asheville – Modern, cloud-based disaster recovery
system to keep essential city operations up and running in the event
of power outages, earthquakes, and major weather events.

London City Airport – Traveler app that brings together
real-time data from sensors, airline systems, and airport services to
help passengers efficiently navigate the airport.

City and County of San FranciscoPlanning Department –
Website for citizens, businesses, and city employees to access
detailed property information for zoning, real estate transactions,
and permitting.

Four grand prize winners were selected for the Partners in Innovation
Award, recognizing applications that solve local government challenges:

NuCivic (NuCivic DATA) – Open source data management platform
that allows governments to make a wide range of open data sets
available to the public. Civil servants can use these data sets to
benchmark their cities and inform decisions and policies; developers
can use them to build services and applications for citizens.

Neptune Technology Group (N_SIGHT IQ) – Cloud-based data mart
for local utility companies to leverage water usage data to better
manage local resources. Utility companies have used N_SIGHT IQ to
reduce local water usage and customer complaints by giving citizens
the tools and information to better track and manage their water usage.

Str LLC (ePropertyPlus) – Property inventory management system
that helps cities effectively manage community revitalization efforts
by aggregating and mapping data on ownership, development grants, and
construction plans for vacant and abandoned properties.

“We use the cloud to increase the availability and resiliency of our
applications and systems,” said Cordell Schachter, CTO, New York City
Department of Transportation. “It helps us provide important
transportation information directly to the public and to our staff every
day and during critical times.”

According to Robert Cheetham, president and CEO of Azavea, “We
anticipate a world in which geospatial analysis is a broad foundation
upon which government, private, and non-profit organizations operate. We
use AWS to work toward that vision and we are thrilled that our
application, HunchLab, has been recognized through this challenge.”

Government Agency Adoption

The AWS City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge winners are among the
growing number of partners, government agencies, and nonprofits
leveraging AWS for a wide range of applications and initiatives,
including the US Department of the Navy, National Institutes of Health,
Securities and Exchange Commission, the US Department of Interior, The
US Food and Drug Administration, The US Department of Treasury, and the
City of Melbourne. With more than 800 government agencies worldwide, AWS
and its partners have made it easier than ever for government agencies
to procure reliable, secure cloud infrastructure from AWS by adding
several contract vehicles over the last 12 months, including US
Department of Treasury Public Cloud Web Hosting Services, the Department
of Interior Foundation Cloud contract, the Texas Department of
Information Resources contract, and the Federal Aviation
Administration’s eFAST contract.

The US Department of Treasury runs its public web site, Treasury.gov, on
AWS, and has made AWS services available for other agencies to purchase
through the Department of Treasury Public Cloud Web Hosting Services
contract. “We know that the cloud is a fantastic opportunity for
government agencies to scale without limits – but within their budget
constraints,” said Tim Womack, Director, Enterprise Business Solutions,
US Department of the Treasury. “It’s very compelling for federal
agencies to work with a vendor who is constantly innovating and
refreshing its technology without raising prices.”

CIO, CTO & Developer Resources

AWS Customers Innovating in Education

Today, more than 3,000 education institutions, including public and
private universities, community colleges, and K-12 schools and districts
are leveraging AWS. The AWS Education Grants program has provided
millions of dollars in AWS service credits to students and researchers,
who have made advances in health and disease research, scientific
computing, and applied science. In the last 12 months, AWS has supported
grants to students and researchers at more than 1,000 universities in 99
countries.

AWS Education Research Grant recipient and Penn State Assistant
Professor Dr. Howard Salis developed a high-performance computing
platform accessible to researchers via a web portal. “The DNA Compiler
was designed to change the way that genetic engineering is done by
leveraging high performance cloud computing technologies to replace
trial and error approaches,” said Dr. Salis. “Thousands of registered
users from 56 countries have designed more than 50,000 synthetic DNA
sequences using the compiler. The AWS Cloud accelerates biotech research
by allowing our predictive models and design methods to be immediately
accessible to thousands of world-wide users who can receive useful
results even before our research articles are published.”

By providing a technology platform with very broad functionality and a
global footprint of datacenters, AWS is helping education technology
companies such as Coursera, DreamBox Learning, Echo360, LiveSchool, and
Knewton, Inc. innovate and scale education applications that are
changing and extending the classroom experience, introducing new
techniques such as gamification and adaptive learning, and increasing
communication and collaboration between educators, families, and
students.

Knewton, Inc., an education technology company that personalizes digital
courses, was able to launch its educational technology quickly by
operating its infrastructure on AWS. The company has been able to rely
on AWS as more than 3.5 million students have used its adaptive learning
platform for personalized learning plans. “At the beginning of the
school year, we’ll see hundreds of thousands of students coming into the
system all at once,” said Ryan Prichard, CTO, Knewton “One of the best
things about AWS is the ability to scale quickly with very little
advance notice.”

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services, Inc. began exposing key
infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now
widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud
computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and
turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no
longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or
months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's
expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business
needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon
Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost
infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands
of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190
countries around the world. Amazon Web Services offers over 30 different
services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon
Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database
Service (Amazon RDS). AWS Cloud services are available to customers from
data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore,
Australia and China.

About Amazon.com

Amazon opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995. The company is guided
by three principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus,
passion for invention, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click
shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon,
AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire phone, Fire tablets, and
Fire TV are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon.

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